4. Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services: The Long-term Plan for Health and Social Care in Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:45 pm on 12 June 2018.

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Photo of Rhun ap Iorwerth Rhun ap Iorwerth Plaid Cymru 3:45, 12 June 2018

The Welsh public knows that Labour has lost its way with the running of the NHS in Wales and Plaid Cymru wants to get the NHS back on its feet. That is why we pushed for the parliamentary review of health and social care, which gave us a very useful, I think, set of guiding principles. The quick turnaround demanded by that review for the Government to come up with a plan of action was proof, I think, of what we already knew—that this Government has been lacking in strategy for the future of health and care. So, now we have a set of proposals, and there are positive elements, certainly. The £100 million fund, for example, is welcome. Of course it's welcome, but it's not enough, I fear. But, more importantly, it's not the evidence I think I and Welsh patients were looking for of a set of proposals that will lead to a new culture and actually provide the actual means of bringing about that change and setting us off on a new direction.

When the parliamentary review report was published, we came up with a set of asks of the Government, things that we expected of Government in light of what was proposed and set out as a set of principles in that review. So, I'll go through them. There are four that I'll mention here. We need detailed plans to recruit more staff, in particular in primary care. We're talking about putting more weight and more pressure on primary care. That means we have very acute staffing issues that we need addressed. Where is that plan for staffing? We need substantial proposals for policies to prevent ill health. I'm not seeing that. Where are those proposals? Thirdly, where are the plans that we expected, in light of the parliamentary review report, to provide better and comparable data on performance that will allow benchmarking with performance in the other nations, as recommended by the review? And finally, for the time being, this is something that has been partly addressed in the set of proposals that you have announced in the £100 million transformation fund to push forward the agenda of integration, and I think we all want to see integration happening, but we wanted proposals on how services provided by different public sector bodies with different budgets are going to integrate to provide the best possible health and social care. The parliamentary review could give us general principles. I believe actually that was the role of the parliamentary review, to spell out some guiding principles. The Government needed concrete and very, very comprehensive proposals, and I'm afraid that's not what we have here.